My Lifelong Love Affair with the Classics

By Robin Bates | Published: November 17, 2021
British School, Man Reading by Lamplight (1839)

Thursday

Yesterday I wrote about a Los Angeles Review of Books article that seeks to debunk the myth of a classical education. There has never been a time, Naomi Kanakia argues, that we have had massive numbers of students studying the classics. A golden age, during which “the average undergrad could… quote Homer in the original Greek, and when the US Senate was filled with philosopher kings who slept with Marcus Aurelius under their pillows,” exists, like most golden ages, only in our imaginations.

The article disappointed me slightly because Kanakia barely discusses what a classical education does for one. It’s little more, she says at one point, than a class marker. Although she acknowledges at one point that her own extensive reading has “contributed immeasurably to my development as a person,” and at another that the classics “probably” make one “a better thinker or more capable leader,” that’s it. She says nothing else about what her immersion in the classics did for her.

Instead, she treats a classical education like a club she worked very hard to join, only to learn, upon admittance, that it has hardly any members. She walked into hallowed halls, only to find them empty. I sense a feeling of betrayal in her piece, as though she were sold a bill of goods.

She did, however, prompt me to look back at my own life to determine why I don’t fit her profile. While I won’t say that my upbringing was a golden age, it contained more than a few classics, starting with high school.

I attended Sewanee Military Academy, an Episcopalian prep school (now St. Andrews at Sewanee) that believed very strongly in teaching great literature from the past. My first year we read The Iliad, The Odyssey, David Copperfield, and Kim; my second year we surveyed American Literature; my third year focused on British Literature; and the fourth year featured World Literature. The American Literature course was not well taught so I don’t remember it very well, although I do recall Catcher in the Rye (which I hated)and also some fellow student pointing out to me that Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is a masturbation poem. The British Literature course, on the other hand, was my favorite course of all those I have taken. It started with Beowulf and went up through Dylan Thomas, and along the way we read Chaucer, Shakespeare (Hamlet), Donne, Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, the Romantic poets, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, Somerset Maugham and a host of others. In our senior-level World Literature course, meanwhile, we read Antigone, Crime and Punishment, Siddhartha, Camus, Ibsen, and others.

The immersion in the classics inspired me to take Carleton College’s interdisciplinary two-semester humanities course, the first focused on 5th century Athens, the second on the European Renaissance. Although I was a history major, I took two of the British survey courses, a course in the Irish Renaissance, and a course on utopias (including The Republic, More’s Utopia, Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels, and various 20th century utopias and dystopias). I also took a classics course on Greek mythology and, in French, the two surveys (starting with The Song of Roland and ending with Sartre) and courses on Diderot, Rousseau, and the 20th century French novel.

Then I attended a graduate school (Emory) that still had a traditional curriculum, which meant that we had a comprehensive exam covering a long list of works, from Beowulf to Faulkner. We were also encouraged to sit in on undergraduate survey courses to fill in any gaps.

So as far as my own education was concerned, it was fairly classical, even though I didn’t learn Greek and though my two years of high school Latin weren’t enough for me to read any literature. And because I had had this type of background, I was prepared to teach survey courses when I became a professor. Figuring that I’d better teach the highlights in my survey classes, which I regarded as a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Europe where my students should at least get a taste of London, Paris, Rome and Berlin–I taught Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Chaucer, etc. My colleagues did more or less the same. I don’t know whether this confirms or refutes Kanakia’s view of American education.

But let me get to a second point of reflection, which is what I owe the cultural conservatives mentioned by Kanakia. First, here’s what she has to say in a passage I quoted yesterday:

[M]ost books about the humanities take it as a given that we exist in a fallen time, that the golden age of the Classical education is in the past, but lately I’ve started to wonder if that time ever existed. In recollecting my own education, I’ve started to wonder if the contemporary notion of a “Classical education” is largely the product of a series of popular books that began with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and continued through Jacques Barzun’s The Culture We Deserve (1989), Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy (2009), William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep (2014), and others. Like me, these writers were usually outsiders, many of them Jewish (which is to say, they were not themselves part of any notional WASP aristocracy), and they had in their youths at some point bought into the idea of a Classical education. They had pursued this ideal and now found the reality — the position of the Classics in our culture and our educational system — to be somewhat lacking.

Part of me embraced and part of me rejected what these men—they seemed to all be men—had to say. While I too honored the authors they honored, I hated how political conservatives hijacked the classics, using them to batter our multicultural society. “Austen, not Alice Walker” was the slogan of some, which infuriated me since I taught both Austen and Walker and loved them both. “Dead white men” (and a few token dead white women) were used as a club against living authors of color in ways that I found reprehensible. While I have taught Jane Austen so many times that I have parts of her memorized, I have done the same with Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Lucille Clifton’s Quilting, and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues.” They all sing to me, each in his or her own key.

But back to the canonical authors. It became a mission of mine to wrest them away from the reactionary agendas promoted by Lynne Cheney and William Bennett when they headed the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts under Reagan and Bush. If Percy Shelley is right (and I believe he is) that the great authors have a deep vision of human freedom, making them the “unacknowledged legislators of the world,” then by teaching and blogging about them, I hope to connect readers with their liberating visions. As Shelley, writing of Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, puts it,

The imagination is enlarged by a sympathy with pains and passions so mighty, that they distend in their conception the capacity of that by which they are conceived; the good affections are strengthened by pity, indignation, terror, and sorrow; and an exalted calm is prolonged from the satiety of this high exercise of them into the tumult of familiar life…. In a drama of the highest order there is little food for censure or hatred; it teaches rather self-knowledge and self-respect.

The dusty classics enlarge our imaginations—or to use Lisa Simpson’s verb, embiggen us—and so do the best contemporary authors, including that current target of rightwing attacks, Toni Morrison. And as Shelley preaches, if our imaginations are enlarged, then we become motivated to create a world in which all of us—whatever our class, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, or sexual identity—can have the freedom to put our full selves into play.

We feel the stirrings of possibility when we are in the grip of a great work of literature. My mission is to connect readers with works that will set the wheels in motion and give them a sense of where they might go with them.

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Classical Education and Upward Mobility

By Robin Bates | Published: November 16, 2021
Zinaida Serebriakova, Zinaida Serebriakova Reading a Book

Wednesday

A fascinating article in the Los Angeles Book Review questions whether there was ever a golden age where most students were classically educated. According to Naomi Kanakia, it’s a myth that isn’t borne out by the facts.

Speaking as one who believes fervently that one should be well read and that classic literature enhances one’s life, I’m sad to say that she seems to have a point.

Kanakia starts with her own longing for that vision:

I’m an immense fan of books that bewail the state of the humanities and plead for a return to the educational system of yesteryear, when the average undergrad could, we are told, quote Homer in the original Greek, and when the US Senate was filled with philosopher kings who slept with Marcus Aurelius under their pillows.

She then reports that, for the past twelve years, her own reading choices have been shaped by her determination to achieve a “classical education.” She has done this, she says,

because I thought it was what you did: I thought all writers read Tolstoy and Euripides and Chaucer — that a writer would be laughed out of town if they weren’t familiar with the “the canon.”

Like the Vietnamese immigrant Phuc Tran, whom I wrote about recently, Kanakia used Clifton Fadiman’s The New Lifetime Reading Plan: The Classical Guide to World Literature to determine her reading choices. As a result, over the past 12 years she has read

Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Herodotus, Suetonius, Tacitus, Plutarch, the Bhagavad Gita, Defoe, Gibbon, Fielding, Richardson, St. Augustine, Rousseau, Voltaire, Cervantes, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Ibsen, Gogol, Chekhov, Pushkin, Cather, Faulkner, Woolf, Waugh, Nabokov, and others.

Much of Kanakia’s article is about her realization that few people in the past have subscribed to such an ideal. They didn’t do so in ancient Rome or in Elizabethan England or in 19th century Oxford-Cambridge-Harvard-Princeton-Yale. Indeed, more periods of history than not have thought it “ungentlemanly” to pay too much attention to books. Nor, she reports, do most contemporary writers advocate such an education:

[A]fter I came into contact with the literary world, I realized that I’d been operating from a very mistaken — and hopelessly bourgeois — set of beliefs. I’ve only rarely met other writers who care about the Classics. When one National Book Award–winning author asked me my favorite authors, I responded, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Henry James, and he chided me, saying I should read more contemporary books (I read plenty of contemporary books, but I’d think it strange if someone’s favorite author of all time was still alive).

She discovered the same was true of her classmates in a Master of Fine Arts creative writing in which she enrolled:

Forget about reading Homer, most hadn’t read Middlemarch or David Copperfield. To the extent that they were influenced by literature, it was by recent American literature: Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson were popular influences. Virginia Woolf, at least, had some adherents, but even the modernists weren’t terribly popular, though most had some familiarity at least with Faulkner and Hemingway….According to the Classical model, this is essentially the same as being uneducated. 

Kanakia wonders whether her vision was shaped by cultural conservatives like Harold Bloom and Allan Bloom—and whether they themselves were moved by wanted they wanted to believe than reality:

[M]ost books about the humanities take it as a given that we exist in a fallen time, that the golden age of the Classical education is in the past, but lately I’ve started to wonder if that time ever existed. In recollecting my own education, I’ve started to wonder if the contemporary notion of a “Classical education” is largely the product of a series of popular books that began with Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and continued through Jacques Barzun’s The Culture We Deserve (1989), Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy (2009), William Deresiewicz’s Excellent Sheep (2014), and others. Like me, these writers were usually outsiders, many of them Jewish (which is to say, they were not themselves part of any notional WASP aristocracy), and they had in their youths at some point bought into the idea of a Classical education. They had pursued this ideal and now found the reality — the position of the Classics in our culture and our educational system — to be somewhat lacking.

Only twice in American history, Kanakia argues, has the ideal of a classical education ever predominated amongst those in power:

The ideal that haunts America is the notion of an educated elite: a political class that is also well versed in Classical literature and history. But it’s clear, at least to me, that whether such an elite ever existed in the United States is debatable. If it did, it was only at two moments: in late 18th-century Virginia and early 20th-century New England. The Virginian planters — the children and grandchildren of adventurers — used their wealth and leisure to study. In many cases, they were the first generation of their family to be formally educated. And the early 20th-century WASP elite, finally freed from the religious shackles their ancestors had worn, tried belatedly to catch up to the continental attainments that their great-grandparents had fled from….[T]he founding fathers were highly educated and well versed in Classical culture, as was the run of patrician presidents early in the 20th century: Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt.

Kanakia’s conclusion: While the ideal of being well-versed in the classics has been around for a long time, for the most part those in power have only paid lip service to it. This had the effect, however, of motivating people who saw it as a ticket to joining the power elites. As I noted in my post on Phuc Than, that is exactly how he saw it. As a result, they often came closer to the ideal than those they strove to emulate:

As Richard Karabel documented in his monumental work The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (2005), the general raising of academic standards at elite universities is almost entirely due to the entrance of Jewish students at the beginning of the 20th century. Because Jewish kids took all this stuff seriously: they actually studied Latin and Greek; they actually studied and absorbed the Classics. In this devotion, they were continuing a process that’s occurred repeatedly throughout history: the children of the bourgeois exploiting brief periods when a Classical education might gain them an advantage in a changing world. They’re similar to the Florentine notaries who studied the secular Classics to improve their Latin and rise in the civil service. Or to the educated laymen of the 14th and 15th centuries in England, scions of gentle families impoverished by the Black Death or merchant families enriched by it, who turned their knowledge of Latin into influential positions at a court that had traditionally been the preserve of the priesthood. Or to Cicero, a fiery orator and novus homo (his family had never held a consulship) who put his talents in the service of an aristocratic party that needed a “man of the people” who could bear its standard and oppose the rising tide of populism.

And then she notes,

What proponents of the Classical education misunderstand is that people never learned Latin and Greek merely because it would “make you a better thinker” or “give you access to the world’s knowledge.” They learned those languages because, at certain times and places, it offered a concrete way of getting ahead. Generally, those were times and places when there was strong growth in a nation’s management responsibilities and when the traditional aristocracy was unable to meet those responsibilities. The middle class, to prove itself, would adopt the culture of the aristocrats, and do it better than they ever could. At most other times, the Classics would languish: they would either be actively disdained, as in early medieval Britain or high Republican Rome, or they would be given mere lip service, as during most of American history. It’s only the active engagement of the middle class that has ever renewed knowledge of the Classics.

And as is always the case, if strivers are too successful at adopting the culture of elites, the elites will simply change the culture:

In some ways, these Jewish students killed Classical education, because Harvard and Princeton and Yale realized that, if they were only to admit students on the basis of their knowledge of Greek and Latin, their entering class would be entirely Jewish.

By the end of the article, Kanakia arrives at a couple of discouraging conclusions. One is that a classical education will not produce leaders, at least in the current environment:

Notice, I leave aside the question of whether knowledge of the Classics makes you a better thinker or more capable leader. I would argue that it probably does but that, in most eras, the wisdom conferred by the Classics is more likely, as Tocqueville noted, to discourage you from pursuing them. As we can see in our own culture, nuance and wisdom are nowhere particularly desired. This is a time for anger, action, and black-and-white thinking.

Another is that most Americans will not be helped by a classical education:

For the bulk of Americans, who are destined to be employees rather than bosses, and whose public role, even as citizens, has been increasingly devalued by the slipping-away of our democracy, there is little need to concern oneself with their education, nor do I think it will be possible to get them to ignore the fact that the wisdom conferred by a Classical education will be useless to them in the life of precarity and drudgery to come.

And further on,

The Classics can’t save us. They can’t generate wealth and opportunity from nothing.

I won’t spend time today talking about why I disagree—my daily essays are devoted to the many different ways that the classics can indeed “change your life”—but I nevertheless find Kanakia’s article very useful. It has me thinking about why I think the way I do. Tomorrow’s post will share those reflections.

For the moment, I’ll just note that she does make one important concession in her final paragraph:

[A]t the moments when [the classics] are most useful, the moments when ordinary people once more have a role to play in public life, they inevitably emerge to guide the way.

Kanakia doesn’t provides examples as to how exactly this guidance will work. Her piece is much more about classical education as a means of credentialing rather than as a way to learn vital life skills. Nevertheless, I’m glad to see her acknowledge that, at certain times, the classics can prove useful.

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A Bridge Poem for Infrastructure Week

By Robin Bates | Published: November 15, 2021
Ernest Lawson, Brooklyn Bridge

Tuesday

Yesterday President Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, described by the White House as “a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure and competitiveness.” To celebrate, here’s a poem by Tennessee poet Will Allen Dromgoole,” who lived at a time (1860-1934) when such poems were regularly published in daily newspapers and when, as a result, poetry enjoyed a much higher readership than it does today.

The poem is somewhat hokey–Dromgoole sounds like she churned out poetry by the barrel, writing over 8000 poems in her lifetime–but it has a nice sentiment to it, very much in the spirit of Biden’s accomplishment. It shows how popular poetry–which is to say, poetry that could be understood by just about anyone–contributed to America’s civic religion in the early 20th century. The central tenet of that religion was that people should care more about the good of society and about future generations than about themselves.

Given that the poem is about building bridges, it also reminds us that America used to be more optimistic about its future. It used to have less difficulty imagining grand construction projects.

The Bridge Builder
By Will Allen Dromgoole

An old man going a lone highway,
Came, at the evening cold and gray,
To a chasm vast and deep and wide.
Through which was flowing a sullen tide
The old man crossed in the twilight dim,
The sullen stream had no fear for him;
But he turned when safe on the other side
And built a bridge to span the tide.

“Old man,” said a fellow pilgrim near,
“You are wasting your strength with building here;
Your journey will end with the ending day,
You never again will pass this way;
You’ve crossed the chasm, deep and wide,
Why build this bridge at evening tide?”

The builder lifted his old gray head;
“Good friend, in the path I have come,” he said,
“There followed after me to-day
A youth whose feet must pass this way.
This chasm that has been as naught to me
To that fair-haired youth may a pitfall be;
He, too, must cross in the twilight dim;
Good friend, I am building this bridge for him!”

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Vax Resisters and…Wuthering Heights (?!)

By Robin Bates | Published: November 14, 2021
Fritz Eichenberg, Catherine Earnshaw haunted by regret

Monday

Adam Gallinsky, who teaches “leadership and ethics” at Columbia Business School, has written an eye-opening Washington Post article on the role of “anticipated regret” in vaccination decisions. Understanding the psychology at work, he says, “can help us get more shots into arms, removing one of the final obstacles to controlling the virus.” As I thought about the fear of feeling regret, I looked for literary examples and settled on, of all things, Wuthering Heights. I realize this is a stretch but hear me out.

First, however, to Gallinsky, who contends that positive incentives don’t necessarily work with the vaccine hesitant. That’s because, in their cost-benefit calculations, they fear the regret that comes with doing something wrong more than they fear the regret that might arise from doing nothing at all. To illustrate, Gallinsky cites the work of a Nobel-winning economist:

Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making — have demonstrated these tendencies in a series of experiments. For example, Kahneman found that people anticipate feeling more regret if they were to lose money by switching to a new stock vs. taking a loss on their current stock. And this regret is maximally intensified when we freely choose to take action— we are not ordered or coerced — and when it involves new or experimental activities. For example, Kahneman found that people anticipate more regret when imagining an accident that occurs while driving home along a new route compared with driving on one’s normal route. Anticipated regret is why people often prefer to stand still rather than move forward.

Gallinsky says that calculations often change, however, with vaccine mandates, which are proving to be overwhelmingly effective. (Gallinsky points out that, despite fierce initial resistance among New York police and predictions of mass resignations, in the end no more the three dozen out of 35,000 officers refused to get the shot.) “When people don’t feel the weight of making their own choice,” Gallinsky points out, “they aren’t as tormented by the anticipated negative outcomes of their decision.”

Gallinsky adds that mandates should be accompanied by “empathic firmness.” “When people sense that those enforcing a policy are listening to them,” he says, “they are less likely to shut down.”

Now to literature, where one finds many characters who take a seemingly safe and familiar route rather than an adventurous one (not that getting vaccinated is all that adventurous), only to regret it later. I single out Emily Bronte’s headstrong Catherine Earnshaw, who marries another member of the gentry rather than her soulmate Heathcliff. Anticipating regret if she makes the wild and unconventional choice, she chooses instead the familiar one, only to find herself deeply unhappy. Because she is a strong personality, she makes everyone around her miserable as well, and the household is in constant turmoil until she dies.

I realize now, in applying the work, that I disagree slightly with Gallinsky. He makes it sound as though it is only because the vaccine is unfamiliar that some are unwilling to take it. He doesn’t mention the positive rewards that come with not taking it. In Catherine’s case, the reward is a comfortable and familiar upper-class life. In the case of vaccine resisters, the reward is getting to feel both superior too and victimized by the Enlightenment world of science and medical expertise. One gets to rail against liberal elites and imagine them as frauds. In other words, many vaccine hesitaters anticipate regret at leaving a closed ecosystem that they have committed themselves to. Leaving would be more emotionally charged than selling stock or taking a different route home.

Sacrificing that ecosystem for mere health seems a poor tradeoff, even when health is no further away than the nearest pharmacy.

It appears a poor tradeoff, anyway, until one is hospitalized with Covid, at which point the medical profession appears far more attractive. Many find themselves experiencing actual regret at this stage, as Catherine does with her marriage. Unfortunately, by this point it’s too late.

Interestingly, like a number of the vaccine resisters, Catherine tries to have it both ways: she wants to have her husband and her lover at the same time. (Linton and Heathcliff, understandably, are less enthused by the idea.) For their part, the anti-vaccine crowd want to rail against doctors until they want these same doctors to cure them, just as they want the “socialist” programs of Medicare and Obamacare to cover their medical bills. For that matter, they don’t acknowledge how vaccines have saved us from small pox, polio, the measles, chicken pox, mumps, etc, etc. Like Catherine, many behave like entitled children as they fail to take responsibility for supporting the institutions that support them.

Commentator Tom Nichols, who describes himself as a Never Trump conservative, plays the role of the no-nonsense Nelly Dean, housekeeper at Wuthering Heights who is impatient with Catherine’s histrionic fits, when he calls America “an unserious nation threatened by millions of spoiled, stupid adult children.” Real adults act responsibly–which in this case means taking steps to protect themselves and others. The gyrations of anticipated regret look awfully silly when a safe and effective vaccine is ready to hand.

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Preaching the Gospel to the Poor

By Robin Bates | Published: November 13, 2021
Edward Henry Corbault, Dinah Morris in Adam Bede

Spiritual Sunday

Reprint of a Past Post

I reread George Eliot’s Adam Bede recently for the first time in decades and fell in love again with the itinerant Methodist preacher Dinah Morris. I share today her sermon on the Hayslope village green, which we watch through the eyes of a stranger.

It’s particularly interesting to read Dinah’s sermon at a time when church attendance in the United States is dramatically dropping. I don’t know if this is because people are turned off by the politicization of religion or for some other reason, but I find it sad that people are losing access to the spiritual nourishment that religion can provide. We need people like Dinah to help us get back in touch with the divine. Here’s the first half of Dinah’s sermon:

“A sweet woman,” the stranger said to himself, “but surely nature never meant her for a preacher.”

Perhaps he was one of those who think that nature has theatrical properties and, with the considerate view of facilitating art and psychology, “makes up” her characters, so that there may be no mistake about them. But Dinah began to speak.

“Dear friends,” she said in a clear but not loud voice “let us pray for a blessing.”

She closed her eyes, and hanging her head down a little continued in the same moderate tone, as if speaking to some one quite near her: “Savior of sinners! When a poor woman laden with sins, went out to the well to draw water, she found Thee sitting at the well. She knew Thee not; she had not sought Thee; her mind was dark; her life was unholy. But Thou didst speak to her, Thou didst teach her, Thou didst show her that her life lay open before Thee, and yet Thou wast ready to give her that blessing which she had never sought. Jesus, Thou art in the midst of us, and Thou knowest all men: if there is any here like that poor woman—if their minds are dark, their lives unholy—if they have come out not seeking Thee, not desiring to be taught; deal with them according to the free mercy which Thou didst show to her. Speak to them, Lord, open their ears to my message, bring their sins to their minds, and make them thirst for that salvation which Thou art ready to give.

“Lord, Thou art with Thy people still: they see Thee in the night-watches, and their hearts burn within them as Thou talkest with them by the way. And Thou art near to those who have not known Thee: open their eyes that they may see Thee—see Thee weeping over them, and saying ‘Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life’—see Thee hanging on the cross and saying, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’—see Thee as Thou wilt come again in Thy glory to judge them at the last. Amen.”

Dinah opened her eyes again and paused, looking at the group of villagers, who were now gathered rather more closely on her right hand.

“Dear friends,” she began, raising her voice a little, “you have all of you been to church, and I think you must have heard the clergyman read these words: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor.’ Jesus Christ spoke those words—he said he came TO PREACH THE GOSPEL TO THE POOR. I don’t know whether you ever thought about those words much, but I will tell you when I remember first hearing them. It was on just such a sort of evening as this, when I was a little girl, and my aunt as brought me up took me to hear a good man preach out of doors, just as we are here. I remember his face well: he was a very old man, and had very long white hair; his voice was very soft and beautiful, not like any voice I had ever heard before. I was a little girl and scarcely knew anything, and this old man seemed to me such a different sort of a man from anybody I had ever seen before that I thought he had perhaps come down from the sky to preach to us, and I said, ‘Aunt, will he go back to the sky to-night, like the picture in the Bible?’

“That man of God was Mr. Wesley, who spent his life in doing what our blessed Lord did—preaching the Gospel to the poor—and he entered into his rest eight years ago. I came to know more about him years after, but I was a foolish thoughtless child then, and I remembered only one thing he told us in his sermon. He told us as ‘Gospel’ meant ‘good news.’ The Gospel, you know, is what the Bible tells us about God.

“Think of that now! Jesus Christ did really come down from heaven, as I, like a silly child, thought Mr. Wesley did; and what he came down for was to tell good news about God to the poor. Why, you and me, dear friends, are poor. We have been brought up in poor cottages and have been reared on oatcake, and lived coarse; and we haven’t been to school much, nor read books, and we don’t know much about anything but what happens just round us. We are just the sort of people that want to hear good news. For when anybody’s well off, they don’t much mind about hearing news from distant parts; but if a poor man or woman’s in trouble and has hard work to make out a living, they like to have a letter to tell ’em they’ve got a friend as will help ’em. To be sure, we can’t help knowing something about God, even if we’ve never heard the Gospel, the good news that our Saviour brought us. For we know everything comes from God: don’t you say almost every day, ‘This and that will happen, please God,’ and ‘We shall begin to cut the grass soon, please God to send us a little more sunshine’? We know very well we are altogether in the hands of God. We didn’t bring ourselves into the world, we can’t keep ourselves alive while we’re sleeping; the daylight, and the wind, and the corn, and the cows to give us milk—everything we have comes from God. And he gave us our souls and put love between parents and children, and husband and wife. But is that as much as we want to know about God? We see he is great and mighty, and can do what he will: we are lost, as if we was struggling in great waters, when we try to think of him.

“But perhaps doubts come into your mind like this: Can God take much notice of us poor people? Perhaps he only made the world for the great and the wise and the rich. It doesn’t cost him much to give us our little handful of victual and bit of clothing; but how do we know he cares for us any more than we care for the worms and things in the garden, so as we rear our carrots and onions? Will God take care of us when we die? And has he any comfort for us when we are lame and sick and helpless? Perhaps, too, he is angry with us; else why does the blight come, and the bad harvests, and the fever, and all sorts of pain and trouble? For our life is full of trouble, and if God sends us good, he seems to send bad too. How is it? How is it?

“Ah, dear friends, we are in sad want of good news about God; and what does other good news signify if we haven’t that? For everything else comes to an end, and when we die we leave it all. But God lasts when everything else is gone. What shall we do if he is not our friend?”

Then Dinah told how the good news had been brought, and how the mind of God towards the poor had been made manifest in the life of Jesus, dwelling on its lowliness and its acts of mercy.

“So you see, dear friends,” she went on, “Jesus spent his time almost all in doing good to poor people; he preached out of doors to them, and he made friends of poor workmen, and taught them and took pains with them. Not but what he did good to the rich too, for he was full of love to all men, only he saw as the poor were more in want of his help. So he cured the lame and the sick and the blind, and he worked miracles to feed the hungry because, he said, he was sorry for them; and he was very kind to the little children and comforted those who had lost their friends; and he spoke very tenderly to poor sinners that were sorry for their sins.

“Ah, wouldn’t you love such a man if you saw him—if he were here in this village? What a kind heart he must have! What a friend he would be to go to in trouble! How pleasant it must be to be taught by him.

“Well, dear friends, who WAS this man? Was he only a good man—a very good man, and no more—like our dear Mr. Wesley, who has been taken from us?…He was the Son of God—’in the image of the Father,’ the Bible says; that means, just like God, who is the beginning and end of all things—the God we want to know about. So then, all the love that Jesus showed to the poor is the same love that God has for us. We can understand what Jesus felt, because he came in a body like ours and spoke words such as we speak to each other. We were afraid to think what God was before—the God who made the world and the sky and the thunder and lightning. We could never see him; we could only see the things he had made; and some of these things was very terrible, so as we might well tremble when we thought of him. But our blessed Savior has showed us what God is in a way us poor ignorant people can understand; he has showed us what God’s heart is, what are his feelings towards us.”

Amen.

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Rightwing Book Bans On the Rise

By Robin Bates | Published: November 11, 2021
Robert Darnton, Censors at Work

Friday

It stands to reason that, following their war with America’s scientists and doctors, America’s rightwing would next go after teachers and school librarians. One assault is occurring in the Goddard School District in Kansas, which has directed its school libraries not to check out 29 books, including Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and August Wilson’s 1987 Pulitzer-prize winning drama Fences.

KMUW reports that Julie Cannizzo, Goddard’s assistant superintendent for academic affairs in Goddard, sent out the following e-mail along with the list:

“At this time, the district is not in a position to know if the books contained on this list meet our educational goals or not,” Cannizzo wrote in the email. “Additionally, we need to gain a better understanding of the processes utilized to select books for our school libraries.

“For these reasons, please do not allow any of these books to be checked out while we are in the process of gathering more information. If a book on this list is currently checked out, please do (not) allow it to be checked out again once it’s returned.”

According to KMUW, the e-mail also noted that

the district is assembling a committee to “rate the content of the books on the list” and to review the selection process. She did not say how long the process is expected to take.

Here’s the complete list:

#MurderTrending by Gretchen McNeil
All Boys Aren’t Blue, George M. Johnson
Anger Is a Gift, Mark Oshiro
Black Girl Unlimited, Echo Brown
Blended, Sharon M. Draper
Crank, Ellen Hopkins
Fences, August Wilson
A Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel
Gender Queer, Maia Kobabe
Heavy, Kaise Laymon
Lawn Boy, Jonathan Evison
Lily and Dunkin, Donna Gephart
Living Dead Girl, Elizabeth Scott
Monday’s Not Coming, Tiffany D. Jackson
Out of Darkness, Ashley Hope Perez
Satanism, Tamara L. Roleff
The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives, Dashka Slater
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky, Heidi W. Durrow
The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
 The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel, adapted by Renee Nault
The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
The Testaments, Margaret Atwood
They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group, Susan Campbell Bertoletti
The Book Is Gay, James Dawson
This One Summer (graphic novel), Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
Trans Mission: My Quest to a Beard, Alex Bertie

Given the apparent success of Virginia gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin’s attack on Morrison’s Beloved, I fully expect such lists to become the norm in Republican districts across the country. The trend also makes a lot of sense: if your intention is to take down America’s Enlightenment project, then few things stand in your way more than public education, public libraries, and novels.

In some ways, I’m amazed that teachers and school libraries have gotten away with offering these books for as long as they have. Literature, as I said in a recent post, is like a loaded gun, with the potential to shatter myths and stereotypes. For parents who want to turn out young people exactly like themselves—who think and behave exactly like they do—novels and poems are the enemy. Educators have been handling literary dynamite for a while now, and until recently, parental indifference—at least the indifference of certain parents—has been their friend. English teachers have been seen as just teaching stories, and what harm can stories do?

All that may be about to change as we see educators (I include librarians under that label) suffering the same attacks as medical professionals. Who knew that recommending a mask to protect others would suddenly have angry citizens shouting, “We know where you live!”? Doctors and nurses, like climate scientists before them, have learned that they can’t stay aloof from politics. When your very approach to the world is seen as political, then you have to figure out how to be political in return. The key is to be smart about it.

In some ways, the problem is that educators have become more responsive to kids’ needs, as have the authors of many of the books being banned. When I was a child and a teenager, our teachers didn’t concern themselves with the books we needed to negotiate life’s challenges. They assigned canonical texts which, because they had been written long ago, weren’t seen as having much to do with actual life. Literature was a comfortably boring subject.

Now, however, we are living in the golden age of Young Adult Fiction, and one finds novels exploring every aspect of teenage life—and often getting attacked and even banned as a result. Add to this how much more complicated the world has become and the conditions are ripe for parents lashing out. They are afraid of the world their children are entering, even as their children are hungry for the information that these novels provide.

I wrote recently about a Texas legislator compiling a list of 800+ books that he wants investigated, including John Irving’s Cider House Rules. He’ll want banned any books that

contain material that might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex or convey that a student, by virtue of their race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously.

To that story we can now add another, this one in northern Virginia, where school board members want books not only banned but burned. The Washington Post reports,

 Shortly after the election result in Virginia, a pair of conservative school board members in the same state proposed not just banning certain books deemed to be sexually explicit, but burning them.

As the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star reported Tuesday:

Two board members, Courtland representative Rabih Abuismail and Livingston representative Kirk Twigg, said they would like to see the removed books burned.

“I think we should throw those books in a fire,” Abuismail said, and Twigg said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff.”

Abuismail reportedly added that allowing one particular book to remain on the shelves even briefly meant the schools “would rather have our kids reading gay pornography than about Christ.”

Do you remember the good old days when Republicans excoriated a publisher for choosing not to continue publishing certain obscure Doctor Seuss books for their racist caricatures. Lambasting liberals for “cancel culture” was all the rage then. America’s rightwing extremists, it’s now clear, have never believed in free speech. They’re willing to allow only speech that agrees with them.

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Death Has Made Me Wise, Bitter, Strong

By Robin Bates | Published: November 10, 2021
Kyffin Williams, The Old Soldier

Thursday – Veterans Day

Judge Walter Kurtz, my tennis partner and a decorated Vietnam vet, joked the other day about his children calling him on Memorial Day. “You’re supposed to call me on Veterans Day,” he tells them. “Do you want me dead?”

On Memorial Day we honor our fallen military, on Veterans Day those who are still alive.

World War I veteran Siegfried Sassoon has a powerful memory poem where he contrasts life before and after he witnessed death in the trenches. The fact that, in the second stanza, he sounds like an old man, even though he was only 31 when he wrote the poem, tells us all we need to know. Death has ripped away his innocence and, while it has made him wiser and stronger, it has also made him bitter. Whereas once he reveled /gay and feckless as a colt/
Out in the fields, with morning in the may,” now he asks to be brought

the darkness and the nightingale;
Dim wealds of vanished summer, peace of home,
And silence; and the faces of my friends.

I’m thinking that poet Dylan Thomas was inspired by Sassoon’s childhood memories, echoing them in his “Poem in October” (which I wrote about recently). Sassoon was an admirer of Wales, so maybe that played a role in the Welsh poet’s allusion.

And as with Thomas, the mood turns dark. Sassoon isn’t certain that he will in fact achieve peace of home, silence, and memory of his friends. His heart is “heavy-laden” and his dreams are burning away.

Memory
By Siegfried Sassoon

When I was young my heart and head were light,
And I was gay and feckless as a colt
Out in the fields, with morning in the may,
Wind on the grass, wings in the orchard bloom.
O thrilling sweet, my joy, when life was free
And all the paths led on from hawthorn-time
Across the caroling meadows into June.

But now my heart is heavy-laden. I sit
Burning my dreams away beside the fire:
For death has made me wise and bitter and strong;
And I am rich in all that I have lost.
O starshine on the fields of long-ago,
Bring me the darkness and the nightingale;
Dim wealds of vanished summer, peace of home,
And silence; and the faces of my friends.

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Poetry for Couples Counseling

By Robin Bates | Published: November 9, 2021
Couple Quarreling, from John Bull Magazine (1950s)

Wednesday

As I continue to reflect on Thor Tangeras’s Literature and Transformation: A Narrative Study of Life-Changing Reading Experiences (see my previous posts here, here and here), I’ve just had a realization: if I respond so strongly to Tangeras analyzing life-changing reading experiences, it’s because it’s what I used to do with my students. It’s the part of my teaching that I miss the most.

Today I report on Tangas’s interview of a Norwegian psychotherapist who said that an Ingrid Hagerup poem changed the way she understood her parents’ constant quarreling. I also helped launch her decision to study psychology. Here’s the poem:

Episode

Theirs was not a quarrel, not in the slightest.
Of course not, he said. – Thank you for the meal.
And though their polite words were uttered lightly
They gleamed with old hate under icy seal.

You are welcome, was all that she replied.
She pushed the chair up to the table, intending
With narrow mouth and lips so firmly tied
To build a fence behind her words, unbending.

They stood silent for a moment, on guard,
Both searching for new weapons, the most searing
phrase conceivable, to be thrust so hard,
A poisoned dagger-blade through love’s woof tearing.

She felt venomous words well up inside.
A yellow delight at the thought of harming
Him rose up in her so ruthless and snide.
Then fingers fumbled through his hair, disarming

Her – and now, suddenly, her eyes were filling
In a powerless, inexplicable pain.
She sensed deep beneath all the hate so chilling
The tensed cord from his heart to hers again.

Esther said that the poem, which she read in school as a 17-year-old, it gave her insight into “the complexity and contraries of my parents’ terrible marriage.” She recalls the moment with Tangeras::

I had an instant illumination: ‘Yes, this is them! Two forsaken people.’ ‘Oh, my God!, is that how it is?’ And I also thought: ‘So I am not the only one to have experienced something like this. It can’t be just them two who are like that. It must be universal.’ Yes, I realized that this experience must be common to all people. All of a sudden I could see them as they were, as human beings. As two vulnerable people. That there was a reason why they were like that. And that there was a depth there; something went on beneath the surface behavior. I could see this, because the poem describes precisely how they would act….

A realization went through me: ‘poor mum and dad. They must be suffering so.’ The poem helped me over – into that experience.

And further on:

All this I began to understand then, although that would take many years and I had to move out and start my own life. Which I did as soon as I could. Because it was still a burden to live in the conflict zone between my parents. Her silence and anger, and having to listen to all her moaning and complaining about how awful he was. He was almost frightened of his wife, he was. And she would scream at him what a coward he was. We had to cover our ears on occasions, to protect ourselves.

The turning point in the poem occurs when the wife sees the husband fumbling with his hair:

Thor: In the poem it says ‘and suddenly …” It’s the language of the body. He is despairing.
Esther: When he, he puts his hand to his head, yes, and strokes his fingers through his hair. Then suddenly she becomes aware that he is not out to hurt her. He doesn’t understand much either, and really he feels quite helpless, doesn’t he. And so she no longer feels the urge to say the poisonous things she had intended to.

The metaphor of the tensed cord also leads to a fascinating insight:

Thor: What about that tensed cord? It can only be pulled so far?
Esther: Yes, but that’s when they feel – and this is something that I only thought much later, not when I  first read it  – what she feels then is the emotional tie between the two, which is a tie that holds them, it has not been torn asunder despite all the pain they have undergone. And that is what I realized was the case with my parents too…Thor: I find it fascinating how she has this sudden insight in the poem, and you have a sudden insight about your parents when reading this.
Esther: They were in need of compassion. That’s what I suddenly understood. They weren’t to blame for it! There was love there. And this love was very hard to understand for a young person. Is this love, all the shouting and the silences and the black, black moods? Can there really be something warm, true goodness, underneath it all? Yes, there was. And that’s when I realized: ‘There is a good reason why they are together.’ It has helped me ever since. When I have been working with couples who apparently hate each other’s guts, when one of them screams: ‘I hate you!’ – I never believe that to be the case. That affect is a form of camouflage emotion. ‘Deep below hatred and cold’ there is that emotional chord that binds them.

The truth delivered by poetry never ceases to amaze me.

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Great Novels Tell Uncomfortable Truths

By Robin Bates | Published: November 8, 2021

Tuesday

I’ve written a couple of times about Glenn Youngkin’s attack on Beloved (here and here), which may have helped him win the Virginia governorship, but I want to make one final point. Because Toni Morrison’s novel is in fact social dynamite, it makes sense that those “tap-dancing” with white supremacy (that’s the phrasing of MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart) would be disturbed when their children are assigned it.

But at least those parents acknowledge that stories are powerful. I saw historian Michael Beschloss the other night on MSNBC observe that the incident is overblown because Beloved is only fiction. In saying so, he underestimates the disruptive potential of novels. Indeed, Beloved is meant to disturb readers, Black as well as White. Great literature is often great because it disturbs.

As I reflect on this, an interchange from the Lawrence Kasdan film Grand Canyon (1991) comes to mind, one that I mention in my book. Danny Glover, in the role of auto mechanic, is confronted by a gun-wielding gang leader while attempting to help stranded motorist Kevin Kline. Asked by the man whether he respects him or not, Glover replies, “You ain’t got the gun, we ain’t having this conversation.” One reason why schools are having conversations about Beloved (and why certain schools have also banned Morrison’s Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon) is because Morrison’s fiction is like a loaded gun that could go off at any moment, shattering complacency.

This is a point made by a recent Washington Post column, written before the Virginia election. After reading about the boy—now a Republican operative—who “gave up” on the novel because it was “gross” and hard to handle, African American columnist Cristine Emba recalls her own high school encounter with it:

I was also asked to read Beloved in a high school English class, also in Virginia — Richmond, to be precise. It was a hard read. You felt bad. It was also an illuminating corrective, studied against the Virginia backdrop of Robert E. Lee worship, Stonewall Jackson fetishization, and the plantations where enslaved people, we heard in our history classes, worked mostly happily for noble, caring masters.

Beloved in her case proved to be life-changing:

The novel taught me the power of literature, how words could transmit deep emotion. It did keep me up at night, because I was grappling with the pain of another person, wondering how someone could get to such a place, how people could do these things to one another. The gory details of the book fled my mind in the ensuing years. But the feeling — I never forgot it.

Rightwing Americans, Emba says, fear facing up to the past into which Morrison plunges them. And she does so in ways they never forget:

They fear it because examining our racial history, engaging in empathy for the enslaved and their descendants, might occasion a bit of guilt, a bit of knowledge that our national mythology (and its embedded racial hierarchy) is false, and a bit of responsibility to address racial inequality. It might occasion a bit of change, in short — and we can’t have that.

Youngkin’s promise to Virginiains, in other words, was “Elect me and your kids will never be forced to confront uncomfortable issues”:

In Virginia, all of this hides under a dad-like candidate in a fleecy vest, and in the beseeching eyes of a suburban mom protecting her little boy from books that made lawmakers turn “bright red with embarrassment.” But it is obvious from the segregationist history of “parents’ rights” discourse — and in the particular parts of curriculums most frequently opposed — what the real agenda is.

The problem with avoiding fearful issues is that we don’t so much escape them as push them under, which in turn renders them toxic. Facing up to them is how to break their hold over us, and doing so through novels is one of the most powerful means we have for doing so.

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